Inspire » Spamming

Spam domain renewal – Domain Notification – This is your Final Notice of Domain Listing

ryan — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 16:46:58 +0000

I have received half a dozen of these in the last week. The emails are unsolicited offers to “renew” your domain with the phrase” Final notice” in the subject to get people to open it. The top looks like this:

Then we have the “Scare Line”

And Finally, the false savings:

$75 for one year? This company and most of our clients are registered with GoDaddy, which has their own methods of boosting sales, but charges a fair price of around $12 per year for domain registration. Savings will not be found in this offer or ones like it!

Other info about this spam domain renewal email

The messages come from “codero.com” and also mentions “sesubmission.com“. It’s a shady tactic but perfectly legal. As they say in the fine print at the bottom:

Note that THIS IS NOT A BILL. This is a solicitation. You are under no obligation to pay the amounts stated unless you accept this offer. … There is no pre-existing relationship between DS and the domain mentioned above. This notice is not in any part associated with a continuation of services for domain registration.

Need great advice on an on-call basis? You need 3PRIME in your corner! We offer fair billing and never misrepresent what we do. Check out our testimonials and contact us today!

Spotting phishing and fake order spam in 5 seconds flat

ryan — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 17:33:44 +0000

We get these fairly regularly (1 per week), and occasionally our website maintenance clients forward one to us. Who knows how much time their salespeople waste following up on fake orders, only to decide at the end that the order is fraudulent. Or worse, they ship the order only to find that the payment fails.

Review the following message and I’ll tell you how you know its a BS phishing or fake order spam in 5 seconds flat!

from Carl Harrison
to
bcc submissions@3-prime.com
subject Urgent Order
Good Day,

Hello my name is Carl and with regards to your company, well I email to know if you do have ( Portable Garages ) in-stock for sell and if you do have the ( Portable Garages ) email me back with the types, sizes and the prices on them and also do you accept credit card as a method of payment ? Waiting for your respond back.

Thank You
Carl Harrison

To Address: email isn’t sent to an appropriate person, strong signal it is spam and sent indiscriminately. In this case they BCC’d me, and I don’t even work there! If it makes no sense, don’t waste your valuable time on it!
Subject: Unspecific but related to an “Order” or “Purchase”. The fact that it doesn’t say anything about the order, why its urgent or what their timeline is all signal that the order is fake or seeking to start a scam.
Email Body: “With regards to your company” If they are ready to order, why wouldn’t they properly refer to your company?
How you know in 5 second flat that this is a fake order is that the text in the email body is being filled in by a script. In this case they encapsulated the variable values in parantheses and also failed to make the keyword blend with the text. Furthermore, the request about the product states that basically any size might do, clearly not an urgent need for anything specific.
The second way you know immediately that this is phishing related is they are offering upfront to use their credit card. Period. Real people don’t write emails like this.

If you want to look a little deeper, Google their email address: http://www.google.com/search?hl=&q=”carlh32@yahoo.com”

I choose this example as the best illustration to show that this scammer has been using the same lame script for a while now.

What is a bot

ryan — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 19:46:02 +0000

We build websites for business in Connecticut and many other locations. A recently launched website has started to get form spam, which is an unfortunate fact of life if you want to make it easy for visitors to fill in forms (i.e. no CAPTCHA). Seeing it come in, (Yes, we monitor our forms for spam so business owners can be alerted to activity and what it means), I alerted the owner that this was just spam and could be ignored. A bot had spammed his form and it was not a particularly concerning event.

In response he asked me “what is a bot”.

Here’s what I wrote back:

A bot is like a search engine spider, it is software that visits web pages for various purposes. With search engines, they view pages, download their content and index them to become available in search engines.

In this case, form bots fill in info to see what happens. For example, some forms send the visitor an auto-reply telling them their request was received. If forms do that, then a bot, or robot, can use them to send spam to people using your website. Your form doesn’t do this for precisely that reason.

Spam marketing message received this morning

ryan — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 12:33:48 +0000

And what really kills me is they were boneheaded enough to publish all of our email addresses in the CC field. That’s just plain rude.

So I apologize but I took advantage and responded to everyone offering our services. As business owners, exploiting opportunity must be our top priority.

Here’s my response:

Spam marketing probably means spammy practices.

Since they thought kindly to include me in the mailing, I thought I’d let you all know that if you’d like a free 10 minute consultation regarding valuable keywords you may be unaware of, feel free to contact me.

Other examples of service are

* Regular blogging, news-related, industry specific
* Link-bait articles, promoted via social media
* Highly relevant reciprocal link building
* Article writing and submission (ezinearticles, etc.)
* PRNewsWire paid press release distribution
* Local newspaper submissions in CT
* Onsite architectural optimization (URLs, filenames, internal link profile)
* Onpage keyword optimization

We are located in North Haven, CT and hope to hear from you!

3 articles I read this week

ryan — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 21:29:46 +0000

1) An article about companies using free games on Facebook to generate leads for advertisers, this was really interesting to me, mostly because it explains why half my facebook friends keep trying to pry me into Mafia Wars or some damn thing.

www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/31/scamville-the-social-gaming-ecosystem-of-hell/

2) Another article from TechCrunch concerning Facebook, see a pattern here? This one concerns more general advertising, and really draws attention to why spam exists; It makes a profit.

www.techcrunch.com/2009/11/01/how-to-spam-facebook-like-a-pro-an-insiders-confession/

3) Can’t help but get into some political news, despite my general attempt to avoid it during business, but this one deals with how money affects politics and I think it’s important for everyone to pay attention to such things.

online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704013004574515681098665524.html